001. Project
A personal design project : Happy habits is a habit building mobile app that's friendly, approachable & interactive.
It's aim is to bring balance and harmony in it's user's life by helping them incorporate small habits over a course of time, habits that end up enhancing their life tenfold.
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The app also has a built in AI system for personalised and effective communication.
002. Info
Role
Product Designer (UXR, UX, UI)
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Responsibilities
- Building user personas : doing surveys, guerrilla testing, user interviews
- Making user journeys, app's information architecture
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Low and high-fidelity prototyping
- Designing responsive screens
- Conducting usability studies
- Accounting for accessibility
- Building design systems
- Usability Testing
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003. Overview
Problem
Lifestyle inconsistencies are throwing people off balance and causing multiple emotional, mental, and physical problems.
Solution
An app designed to bring people back on a healthy track and teaching them ‘why’ in the process.
Executed with the power of AI and a cute lifestyle companion, Red, the app converses with the user while learning about the user's personality and preferences. The AI refines it's communication with each interaction, personalising it's experience for every user, making it a fun, motivational experience for all.
004. My Design Process
I was the sole Product Designer and have been responsible for the complete end-to-end UX process. This was executed by keeping the end user in mind.
My approach to this project was to research, synthesise, ideate, design, and validate a suitable solution for the current problem space.
Phase 1 -
Define The Problem
005. Primary Research
I conducted interviews and created empathy maps to understand the users I’m designing for and their needs. These were adults who are suffering from some kind of a lifestyle issue, be it mental, emotional or physical
It narrowed down the issues to adults who have a busy schedule and require a product that will act as a guiding system to help them regulate their daily routines and introduce some balance in life.
006. Competitive Analysis
To better understand the market and it's opportunities, I conducted a competitive audit. This helped me understand the common interactions between similar applications and the targeted user base, also helped me understand loop holes and areas of improvement.
Below is a competitive audit conducted to study other habit builders. Results available in the audit itself.
Focus on building health and wellbeing rather than treating symptoms and diseases.
Phase 2 -
Synthesise & Analyse the Data
007. Affinity Mapping
From my interviews, I organised all my notes into an affinity map. This helped me identify patterns, for example, people need to be motivated and stay motivated, which can be achieved by AI learning more and more about their daily patterns and converse accordingly.
Here is a glimpse of what the affinity map looks like.
008. Creating User Personas
Based on the interviews/user research, I created personas. Each persona is a category for our target audience, it highlights their needs, concerns, and personality traits
I often referred to them throughout the entire product development process to make sure I prioritise the users in my design decisions.
Problem statement for user persona 1:
Anita is a successful design professor
who needs simple ways to improve her overall life
because she is feeling a little worn out.
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Problem statement for user persona 2:
Sid is a hard working brand strategist who wants an app to manage his lifestyle habits for him because he has limited time in his day.
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Phase 3 -
Organise Ideas into Direction
009. Solutions
Starting Slowly
Habit building is a choice, a journey, and once you're on it, there is no turning back. Hence the whole concept is to start slow.
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This translates into the app by allowing the user to only select a maximum of 5 habits as they start their journey, 4 weeks later, 2 habits can be added and so on.
This helps build accountability, consistency and discipline.
Interactive Character
Meet 'Red', your cute and adorable lifestyle companion.
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Red and his recommendations are based on learnings from Happy Habits' proprietary AI that analyses behavioural patterns, and provides the right set of recommendations for each user.
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This helped Happy Habits standout from the competition, helping foster a closer connection, improving overall engagement, continuity and results.
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Instructional Video Content
Habit building is a concept that requires careful study of human psychology to make a long lasting impact.
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In the app, tutorials or guiding videos were introduced so that the user can freely execute their task of the day without any delay or extra effort. This resulted in a much higher achievement number for daily tasks for our users.
010. Identifying User Journeys
Showcasing the possible solutions via storyboards to our users for an initial test run, I've compiled the gathered information into user journeys.
Below is the journey for Anita's persona when asked to use the app as she deemed fit.
011. UX Mind Map
A view of what the UX mind map of the app looks like. This helps identify the MVP and help give developers a fair idea of what the flow of the product will be.
Phase 4 -
Turning Concepts into Designs
012. Information Architecture
Paper wireframes are done at the beginning as it allows the designer to iterate multiple solutions, explore possible information structures, turn them into paper mockups and finalise the path forward.
013. Digital Wireframes
Lo-fidelity designs can be turned into working prototypes through Figma and tested by potential users of the product.
014. Design System
An elaborate system of colours, shapes and typography was built along with rules on how and where to use them. This, what is shown here, is a mere gist of it.
015. Accessibility Considerations
01
Provided access to users who are vision impaired through adding alt text to images for screen readers.
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The colours used are readable and have good contrast.
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Every action and error has a text indication with/without a symbol.
016. The Product
The brand was designed with a wide audience in mind, bringing a nice balance of professionalism and a fun-loving ease. The app is designed with minimalism and functionality at its heart.
The aesthetics were kept soothing on the eyes, architecture was easy to navigate, and everything was made keeping scalability in mind.
The AI character is designed to be approachable, cute and fit for all age groups.
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(the illustrations were made by catalyststuff)
Phase 5 -
Test, Iterate, Repeat
017. Usability Testing
To discover any usability issues, I tested the product with users.
Questions asked were more subjective and open ended;
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01. How was the experience of selecting which habits you wanted to start with?
02. How was the experience of communicating with the app and it's AI features?
03. Were you able to follow through?
04. How was the review of your performance?
018. Usability Testing Findings & Iterations
01
Users were finding it difficult to search for relevant videos separately
This was rectified by adding a link to relevant supportive videos to the daily task itself.
02
Users wanted more interesting notifications along with the reminders.
This was fixed by adding an option for user to write their own personalised messages to their future selves.
019. Lessons Learned
01
The software you use can make the job easier for getting proper feedback and Figma really made it easy for potential users to go through the prototype in detail and leave comments.
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I learned that the ideas can only gain traction if the users find the app usable, easily understandable and most importantly, purposeful.